The ‘Occupied Lens’ in Wartime China: Portrait Photography in the Service of Chinese ‘Collaboration’, 1939–1945

Abstract

This article explores the importance of portrait photography to the wartime collaborationist regime of Wang Jingwei, which governed parts of Japanese-occupied China from 1940 to 1945. The article demonstrates how, for a combination of practical, political, and cultural reasons, studio portraiture was chosen as one of the primary forms of media for the propagation of iconography by this administration. Studio portraiture was also, however, a realm in which this Chinese regime sought to stamp its own mark on visual culture, separate from the iconography of the occupying Japanese. The article demonstrates this by tracing the origins and fate of a number of widely circulated studio portraits of Wang taken in 1939, 1940, and 1941. This article also speculates about the possibility of identifying and defining an ‘occupied lens’ during the war, one which was clearly derivative of prewar forms yet evolved in ways which set it apart both from Japanese propaganda and from the visual culture of resistance.